5 tips to brand your blog

I’m not here to talk about naming your blog and creating a tagline. Today, I wanted to focus a little more on brand design for your blog. I have a degree in Graphic Arts and specialised in branding during my 2nd and 3rd year so I like to think I have a little bit of knowledge to share!

Trying to design a brand for your blog can be hard. There are so many themes to choose from, so many colours, so many fonts etc. I actually like to change my blog design up a fair amount as I find I just get bored after a while. I thought I would share with you my 5 tips that will help you create your brand design.

Create a mood board

I love a good mood board! When you’re trying to design your blog make a mood board with everything that you love. Flick through magazines and papers and cut out things that catch your eye. You may look at something and really like the colours or you may look at something and find the font visually pleasing. The idea of this exercise is to give you an idea of what you like. Eventually, you’ll probably find trends in what you like. You may notice that you really like pink and blue together and you can use this as a guideline for a colour scheme for your blog.

Look at other websites and blogs for inspiration

Never copy someone else, that’s not cool. However, looking around for inspiration is fine. Take a look at your favourite blogs and websites and write down why you like them. Maybe it’s because they’re colourful. Maybe it has a minimalist feel to it that you find appealing. This is going to help you discover more of what you like and it’ll help you with creating your brand design.

Use no more than 3 fonts and colours

To build a brand you don’t want to have too many fonts and colours. You want your brand to be recognisable and if you’re using 15 different fonts and 10 colours then you aren’t going to stand out. I always recommend having a Scripted font and then a Serif or Sans-Serif font to go with it. Below is an example of these types of font. A scripted font is always more difficult to read so you wouldn’t want large bodies of text to be written in this way. This is why it’s good to have a Serif or San-Serif font as part of your branding as it’s easy to read.

Don’t do what everyone else does

You want your brand to be unique to make you stand out from the crowd so there’s no point in doing what everyone else does. You’re probably all going to hate me for saying this … Ages ago I started using the Playlist Scripted font on Canva for my Pinterest images … But now literally EVERYONE uses this. When I browse through blogging group boards on Pinterest it’s just a whole load of images with the Playlist scripted font. It’s a lovely font which is why everyone uses it … but now everyone’s brand looks very similar. There are so many other typefaces out there that will make you stand out and be different. I’ve recently rebranded my blog and used Creative Market to buy a font as I know very few people will have the same. You can also check out Da Font for free fonts. Just make sure you check the license agreements… I’m now starting the fun task of updating all of my Pinterest images to get rid of the Playlist Script font haha.

Photographs don’t have to be flat lays

I sometimes feel like there is a bit of an obsession with blog photographs having to be flat lays! They really don’t. Just experiment and see what works best for you. If you need a little inspiration; try searching for blog photography on Pinterest and it’ll help you with so many ideas. Over time you’ll develop a photography style that you really like and then this style will become recognisable to other people that it’s your photograph.

I hope this has helped you all with branding design and given you some ideas of how you can go about branding your blog so that it’s unique and true to yourself.